Marine Park: Stories

by Chiusano, Mark

  Good tips, the valet said. When I got Sean Penn’s car, once he got in, he gave me five hundred dollars.

  A good day, Courtney said.

  The valet nodded. He was drunk, said the valet. But he was real friendly. He shook my hand. The valet showed her his palm, as if the touch were still there. Are you some kind of actress too? he said.

  Courtney thought about the nonprofit where she worked. It helped set up typing classes for women and the handicapped in Kibera, and got them work digitizing documents. She had wanted a women’s issue job, but she wasn’t in love with the outsourcing. Sometimes she left that part out. Timothy was an air conditioner repairman at an apartment complex in midtown, and he made more money than she did. Yes, she told the valet. My husband too.

  Husband? the valet said.

  You know what I mean.

  I guess so. Sometimes you have to try it out. Would I have seen any of your movies?

  I doubt it, she told him. She suddenly felt very tired. She realized, without having anything she could do about it, that she didn’t have any dollar bills in her purse. The drink was draining from her body, and she would have been ready for Timothy to walk over to her, for her to say she was sorry, for him to apologize first. I know you do things your own way, he would say, fumbling. They could make arguments out of nothing. It was exhausting just thinking about it.

  The valet looked carefully down the wide sweep of the road, buzzing with night bugs.

  Hell, he said, there’s no one coming. It’s the off-season, he said. He sat in the wicker chair next to her.

  They listened to the creaking of the old windows, above their heads.

  Have you ever been to Disney World? the valet asked. When she didn’t answer immediately, he said, Lots of guests go there from here.

  No, she said. Timothy had gone all the time when he was younger, with his family, she thought she remembered.

  The valet didn’t look surprised. For a while, he said, I used to work at one of the hotels right on the Disney campus. All-Star Sports Resort—although I liked Movies better. Sometimes they let us transfer. It wasn’t so up-class as it is here, but I liked it.

  Courtney continued looking out over the porch.

  I had a friend there, the valet said, whose job was to be one of the walk-around characters. One night it was such a long day, around the Christmas holidays, that after the parade, when he finally got off work, he wore his costume directly to the restaurant we were meeting at in Downtown Disney—he was one of those monsters from Monsters, Inc. At the place, he kept the mask from the costume between his legs next to a bar stool, but he stayed in the costume all night. And when parents came out of the restaurant with their kids—who I’d think should have been in bed by that time of night, but the guests always try to get as much in as they can—they’d cover their kids’ eyes when they walked past me and my friend. Like, seven or eight times. It wasn’t a coincidence.

  Courtney had started paying attention in the middle of the story. The scene appeared in front of her above the porch railing. She realized that she was almost crying. She felt the tears coming up, like an epiphany or a revelation, which would clear her head and make everything sensible then; help her order her more or less acceptable life, she thought levelheadedly, an all right life even though it seemed problematic then. Was he all right, your friend? Courtney said, but the valet took it the wrong way.

  I can put you in touch with him, if you’re looking for some acting work, he said gently.

  Courtney gave him a tight smile, and nothing else.

  • • •

  On the wharf Timothy turned back around again, looked away from the hotel, looked out on the lighthouse blinking red, and off, and red, and off. He was too old to be jealous of someone talking to Courtney. He concentrated on a docked fishing boat whose cabin was covered with Christmas lights, not plugged in. It wasn’t like that when they met. It was at the Mariners, on Fillmore, where Timothy was watching a Rangers game with his lovesick cousin Eamon. Eamon lived in Carroll Gardens then, off the F train, but he came back to the Mariners sometimes since his girlfriend left. The whole bar noticed Courtney when she walked in. For some reason she came right up to Timothy. Hi, she’d said. Let’s talk for a little while. He wanted to tell her that he didn’t usually go to the Mariners; there was just the Rangers game. For the rest of the time there he tried to explain that. It had been a hot night, like this one, when they walked outside of the bar, leaving Eamon behind. It was muggy. Fillmore was the same distance from the water as here, practically, if Timothy thought about it geographically.

  They had reservations at this hotel for three more nights. They were staying in the annex. It was a fifteen-minute drive away, and they would be here until the end of the week. Then there was nothing else. He guessed they would drive back home. They still rented their condo. He was OK with that, didn’t itch for anything different, which was why Courtney called him a fool, off and on again. There was all the time in the world, though. The water confirmed: all the time in the world. Timothy stayed at the end of the wharf for a while, waiting for Courtney to come back, but she didn’t, and at a certain point he didn’t dare turn around and look for her. It would have admitted defeat.

  He looked out over the water. In the reflection of the lamplight, and the intermittent glow of the lighthouse, the bay between the island and the land shimmered, just a few lights on the other side of the coast. Timothy thought he saw something surfacing and disappearing in the waves, and when he looked closely he was sure he saw something, and heard a corresponding animal sound to go with it, but then he couldn’t be sure it wasn’t driftwood. The water lapped and lapped.

  He walked down the end of the wharf to the dock, which had a door over it, a chain-link door leading to nowhere, with triangular extensions on either side, like sails or ears, to prevent climbing around. Timothy did it anyway, swinging himself around the sail. He walked to the end of the dock, where all the lights died away.

  No one called for him. Courtney was on the porch. The seafood restaurant built on pilings right off the shore was closed, or else nobody was out to bother him at this hour. No waiters or valets came running. He’d always wanted to do something unaccustomed in life, like jump into an open body of water with all his clothes on, his shoes even. He thought about this sometimes on planes coming into JFK for a landing, over Rockaway Beach. But as he knew he would, he took off his clothes methodically, his jacket first and then his shirt, waiting modestly for his jeans to be last, his best pair of dress jeans. He laid these all out on the edge of the wooden dock. When he fell backward into the water, it hardly felt cold; just a continuation of the air on his skin. He remembered, without meaning to, what it had felt like, as a child, to learn how to swim—the overchlorinated high school pool, the gray lockers off the gym, the bang of their swinging back and forth. He dove deep, resurfaced, realized he couldn’t see the bottom, or anything close to the bottom, and for the first time in many times of swimming he felt scared, unsure of what was below the surface. Inadvertently he touched some driftwood, pulled his hand back in shock. It was so black, as far as he could see, and he couldn’t lift himself up farther. The oily water opened around him like a mouth, the orifice as far as he could see of some face. He scrambled up the slimy old metal rungs of the dock ladder. He sat there on the edge, gasping for breath, though he hadn’t realized he’d needed to. The hot air dried him after a while, and slowly his breathing calmed. He was shivering, leaning back, his arms hugging what they could of his body, and he felt entirely satiated.

  TO LIVE IN THE PRESENT MOMENT IS A MIRACLE

  This was when Hayden was living in graduate housing at Brandeis. He had a little room to himself and his own door with a lock on it, and he never put posters up. This was during the period of us-learning-to-be-better-communicators, which was something he felt strongly about.

  Hayden had become good at talking about his feeli
ngs, even though that was something we hadn’t done when we were first friends. He broke his wrist and was in a cast before high school and I helped him with that, but it doesn’t count. I didn’t talk about feelings with anyone, because Lorris was too young. Hayden lost his virginity to his girlfriend at the same time I did with mine, and we didn’t talk about it until two months after. And even then I didn’t bring it up, just said, me too, after he said his piece—I’ve got something to tell you, man. That was in the stands at Icahn Stadium in the spring, right after Hayden got knocked out of medaling at Cities in the 800-meter run. I’d done the mile, and broke 4:40 for the first time. He had long hair that season, and he was beginning to lose interest in track because of his girlfriend. A few months ago something incredible happened, he said.

  They called the place where Hayden lived Grad, capital G, as if it were more than a place but also a state of mind. It was far from the rest of the dormitories and classroom buildings: the main campus was up a winding road at the top of a hill, where there was a corny little castle that someone had built in the 1950s. The type of thing that, at nighttime, looked amazing, lit up with red ramparts and a view of the Charles and the train tracks at the bottom of the hill. But in the daytime it looked like something that someone had built in the 1950s.

  Hayden was happy to be living in Grad, as a junior, even though everyone gave him a hard time for it: complaining that it was too far away and that they never saw him anymore, because he always retreated there to his single room and the graduate students with their guitars, reading theory in their beds. He maintained that this wasn’t true; that he, for instance, spent a lot of time in the Peace Room, which was in the place where the dungeon would be if the castle had a dungeon. He took me there once, although he opened the door first and peeked in to make sure no one was inside, because he said that the Peace Room regulars usually didn’t like to be disturbed. Not that I was a disturbance at all, he said. I was a good influence on him, and he thanked me for that.

  I’d always wanted to go to school away from home, but sometimes things don’t work perfectly. CUNY takes just about anyone, and they promised they’d be opening dorms at Brooklyn College by my sophomore year. They didn’t, of course. Brooklyn College is the type of place that hasn’t changed since my parents went there—my dad on the GI Bill, my mother looking for a husband who wasn’t Italian—and they didn’t end up finishing those dorms just like they never built the swimming pool that my dad and his Navy friends were always asking for. What were they supposed to do to stay in shape? they asked the administration. The provost at the time was a running guru who had done Boston, New York, and Berlin, enough years after that other war, and he tried to get them to start a track team (they didn’t), or at least go for runs with him all around Brooklyn. They did it once, but what they really wanted was to hit something or be completely covered by water, and running was a pretty poor exchange. I ended up living at home and saving my money, listening to my dad snicker about Brooklyn College. He’d stopped taking classes his senior year, and there wasn’t really an explanation why. Some things just happen. It was a better experience for my mother. If I could stand to, I stayed at the Sugar Bowl after classes until dinner, avoiding watching Lorris get back from school and sit right down to his homework. Eventually I stayed longer and longer, even when I wasn’t taking classes, looking at the captioned TV. I established once that the waitress knew my dad when he used to hang out there. After that she gave me the stale bagels, which I’d take home and let him eat.

  Hayden was always trying to get me to come visit, and I did, more often than I should have. Academically, there hadn’t been much of a difference between him and me, though I guess he wrote better essays. My mother said she didn’t think it was worth it to go away to expensive private colleges when we had perfectly good ones here. We do, and what’s the difference in the end, but Hayden seemed to enjoy living away. He said, even up to junior year, people had late-night conversations about the things they were studying, the books that classes assigned. Which sounds like bullshit to me, like one of the brochures that the private colleges send from random places in the South. Nobody was that earnest about it at Brooklyn, though if you kept your head down you could get an education. I was taking my math requirement that semester, even though the professor asked if I was sure I wanted to. I’d been in and out. He said, Are you staying this time? I said I was back for good. It was a survey: “Mathematical Topics.” Sometimes you learn some good things.

  I promised myself I wouldn’t spend more than two weekends a month up at Hayden’s that year—though because he was a junior, I was starting to get anxious that I was losing the chance. When we talked about it, he said simply, Literally, whenever. He invited Lorris too, though it was mostly just to be nice. He said we could move a mattress in and he could get me someone’s old Brandeis ID and a copy of his key. I did end up getting a copy of the key, for the nights when Hayden went off with a girl, although those were very rare: because when I was there, he said that it was more important that we spend time together, and catch up; girls would be around forever.

  Hayden had taken a class last semester that he said had changed his life. He had started out majoring in business, like his father wanted. His dad studied econ and law in Tel Aviv and was a real estate broker here. But the class, called “Peace, Social Change, and a New Way of Viewing Human Interrelations,” made Hayden switch to sociology. You’d think those would have been difficult, stressful times for him, full of calls home and imploring his mother for support, but Hayden rarely called home, and actually didn’t know too much about how his parents were doing—just like they didn’t see much of him besides the semester’s bill, which they immediately sent up to Hayden. Even I asked if it would be tough to graduate on time with requirements, and he said, Please. It’s Brandeis.

  “Peace, Social Change, Etc.” was a class taught by an elderly Iranian man named Yahya, who had converted to Judaism twenty-five years ago. He was one of a whole new host of Brandeis professors who were beginning to wear jackets without ties, and in the winter, under his blazer, a blue turtleneck that had sweat stains seeping from under the arms. You had to write multiple essays to get into the class, and it was only the most talented and dedicated who did—everyone wanted a spot because every other week they went on peace retreats to one of Yahya’s numerous friends’ cabins, in the Berkshires, or on the North Shore, or near Walden Pond. There, they cooked meals for each other, drank pinot grigio with Yahya, and practiced looking into each other’s eyes when they conversed, while they listed one thing they appreciated about each and every member of the class. Yahya wouldn’t smoke with them, but he said that it wasn’t for him to set rules for them to go by, and when, on the first day of class, they put smoking pot into the legal section of their new social constitution, he said that this would be a good experiment in learning each other’s boundaries.

  This was after their trip to the Berkshires, and I was staying until Monday. Hayden was sitting at his desk, mixing songs on GarageBand, and I was lying on the mattress, trying to decide why it somehow worked that Hayden left all the walls blank in his room. Above his desk he had a quote—“We are very good at preparing to live, but not very good at living”—but that was it, with his computer and the wires of his speakers in a corner. It was barely ten when three of his friends came over, bringing with them their leftover dinner, which we ate on the floor, the new people sitting on the mattress and Hayden in his chair. He offered them a beer but passed on one himself. He had told me that he was beginning to feel that he had a small drinking problem and had made me promise that I wouldn’t let him black out that night. He had a habit of doing so, back home when we’d go to bars in the East Village.

  One of the girls got a text on her phone to say there was something going on in Gordon, which was a fifteen-minute walk away and just outside the main entrance to campus. There was a semi-famous DJ playing there who had been making the rounds of New England col
leges. The walk was frigid, and when we arrived we found only six guys from the tennis team drinking pink champagne out of a bottle. They were sitting in a circle and passing the bottle to one another. Hayden seemed to know a few of them, and I was introduced, and we let the bottle go around maybe once or twice before it was empty. The tennis players were reminiscing about stories from their preseason camp, and Hayden was listening politely and asking clarifying questions here and there. For a while we passed around the empty bottle, taking a swig from it, as if there was some left at the bottom. There didn’t seem to be any more bottles, or any newcomers, so we left.

  There was a similar situation in the works at a frat house, and this was promised to be better. Hayden had met his last girlfriend at a frat house. We had been slotted next on the beer pong table, and he told me to wait a second, he had to run to the bathroom. I never felt so alone as when he disappeared while I was visiting at Brandeis. Everyone, the entire time, knew that I wasn’t supposed to be around. The time he met his girlfriend he had disappeared, and when he came back, it was with two girls, one obviously his interest and one dragged along for my sake. That one, Gloria, had a perfectly diamond-shaped scar on her lower back. I traced the parallel lines later that night, in one of the upstairs rooms at the frat, once Hayden had brought his girl home. That lasted almost all semester, but she’d ended it after the Peace class started and he asked her to keep her eyes open during sex.

  The frat party was in the basement, below a set of water-heating pipes, and every once in a while a particularly tall boy wearing a backward flat-brim cap would hit his head on the ceiling. We made our way over to the bar area to get drinks. Hayden gripped my outside shoulder and pulled my ear close.

  Play along, he said.

  We were next in line when Hayden started collecting cups and bottles and making two drinks himself, with the bartender frowning over him. One of the backward-hat kids stopped dancing and came over.